Wednesday, October 5, 2016

I make my usual promise, which I have paid out on several times:
If,
within the next six months, I take a job which lasts longer than one
month, and that is not obtained through an agency, then on the day the
first cheque from that job cashes, I'll give £500 to the person who
provided the crucial introduction.

If there are a
number of people involved somehow, then I'll apportion it fairly between
them. And if the timing conditions above are not quite met, or someone
points me at a shorter contract which the £500 penalty makes not worth
taking, then I'll do something fair and proportional anyway.

And
this offer applies even to personal friends, and to old contacts whom I
have not got round to calling yet, and to people who are themselves
offering work, because why wouldn't it?

And obviously
if I find one through my own efforts then I'll keep the money. But my
word is generally thought to be good, and I have made a public promise
on my own blog to this effect, so if I cheat you you can blacken my name
and ruin my reputation for honesty, which is worth much more to me than
£500.

And I also make the following boast:
I
know all styles of programming and many languages, and can use any
computer language you're likely to use as it was intended to be used.

I
have a particular facility with mathematical concepts and algorithms of
all kinds. I can become very interested in almost any problem which is
hard enough that I can't solve it easily.

I have a
deserved reputation for being able to produce heavily optimised, but
nevertheless bug-free and readable code, but I also know how to hack
together sloppy, bug-ridden prototypes, and I know which style is
appropriate when, and how to slide along the continuum between them.

I've
worked on many sizes of machine. I've written programs for tiny 8-bit
microcontrollers and gigantic servers, and once upon a time every IBM
machine in the Maths Department in Imperial College was running my
partial differential equation solvers in parallel in the background.

I'm
smart and I get things done. I'm confident enough in my own abilities
that if I can't do something I admit it and find someone who can.

I
know what it means to understand a thing, and I know when I know
something. If I understand a thing then I can usually find a way to
communicate it to other people. If other people understand a thing even
vaguely I can usually extract the ideas from them and work out which
bits make sense.